Fastmail opens a European data region in Amsterdam

Fastmail, an email service that has been running for more than 25 years, has added the ability to choose a data storage region. Previously, all accounts were hosted entirely in the US; now the European Union can be made the primary storage location. The company attributes the demand to the requirements of local law, compliance considerations, and users' desire to keep their data closer to home.

Its own hardware, not rentals

For the new region, Fastmail has installed its own servers in a secure data center in Amsterdam — to the same standards as its facilities in Philadelphia and St. Louis. The company stresses that it does not rent computing capacity from large cloud providers but uses its own equipment and software, right down to the specific model of disk. In every location the data is stored encrypted in locked racks and maintained by the company's own team.

What stays in the US

Fastmail lays out in detail exactly where the data flows. For an account in the European region, the primary copy of mail and files lives in Amsterdam, that is where incoming mail arrives by default, and that is where apps connect. However, since there is still only one facility in Europe, the geographically separated backup copy remains in the US. Disaster-recovery backups for all users are also stored there (in Philadelphia), along with system logs and third-party service data for billing, debugging, and support. Some metadata — addresses, information about connected services, site hosting, and the Files feature — is replicated across all locations.

Honesty instead of promises

The most notable thing about the announcement is its tone. Fastmail is an Australian company, subject to Austridian... that is, Australian law and international treaties on legal cooperation. The company states plainly: wherever the data is stored, it will respond to lawful requests from the authorities in the same way. And if a user needs a guarantee that their data will remain exclusively in the EU — there is no such guarantee, and it is better to say so directly than to let people build up illusions.

“Most providers decide for you and tell you as little as possible. We prefer to show our work,” sums up CEO Bron Gondwana.

How to switch

Fastmail preselected users with European billing addresses for the new region and has already moved their encrypted copies to Europe. Everyone else stays in the US by default, but the region can be changed in the settings (the Data residency section under GDPR). The move to Europe is slower — the data has to be synchronized across the ocean. The company has deliberately chosen not to charge extra for the European region, deeming that wrong.

Source: Hacker News